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British company Dyson is most famously known for its high-end vacuum cleaners touted on the air by founder, chief engineer and namesake James Dyson. But the company also makes a wide variety of other electronics, and in 2017 officially signaled its ambitions to dive into the nascent market for electric vehicles. By that time, Dyson had formed a team of hundreds of engineers, acquired a Michigan ba...

The founder of secretive electric vehicle startup Faraday reportedly declared bankruptcy in the U.S. after running up more than $2 billion in debts. Bloomberg, citing court documents filed in Delaware, reports that under a debt restructuring plan, Jia Yueting plans to turn over his stake in the EV company to his creditors in China. Jia, the founder of a sprawling Chinese tech company, emerged as t...

Huntington Ingalls is regarded as the largest shipbuilder in the U.S. And if a recent suit filed against the company comes to fruition, it will also be responsible for one of the largest fraud cases against a military supplier in recent history. For nearly 10 years, submarines from the company’s shipbuilding facility in Newport News, Virginia have struggled to maintain the sound-dampening coating...

The use of hand grenades on the battlefield goes back to the 1500s. Weighing up to six pounds, these early versions were basically hollow metal balls filled with gun powder and attached to slow-burning fuses. Over time, the weight has gone down and the effectiveness has improved. However, one element of these explosive devices that has remained a challenge is customizing their output based on the...

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s Ericsson was one of the leading names in an emerging product category – mobile communication devices, or cell phones. This was a time before Android and Apple, so the Swedish telecom company was competing against the likes of Motorola, Nokia and Blackberry. During this time the stakes were high, the opportunities higher, and the lay of the mobile networking lan...

When GM announced this summer that they’d be moving the engine in the 2020 Corvette, people went bonkers. It was like Beatlemania.  That’s because the change to a mid-engine was just one piece of a complete overhaul: a redesign from the ground up that, according to Chevy, that left only a single part carried over from the original.  But there was more in store, as Chevy debuted its Stingray this w...

Social media continues to make the human resource waters murkier than ever, especially when it comes to deciding what to share on your accounts, but also what companies peruse when considering new applicants. While industry professionals, universities, and even grade schools constantly remind children and professionals to think carefully about anything they post online, stories continue to pop up...

Let’s just be real: Doing your taxes is complicated and hard, and even the most honest of individuals can find themselves making a mistake here and there. And if you do, that’s what the auditors are for, right? Unless nobody is paying attention. A recent audit conducted by a U.S. Treasury Department watchdog revealed that some-$82 million in credits were bestowed upon American taxpayers over a fiv...

What does parenthood and space exploration have in common? Both take a village. According to a recent report from Business Insider , SpaceX wants to buy-out residents of a small retirement community outside of its Texas rocket-launch site. According to offer letters from the company, it didn’t anticipate the “significant disruptions” that its’ launching activities have created.  According to offer...

Nio delivered fewer cars as the government phases out subsidies for electric vehicles.  Electric vehicles are considered part of the future of transportation, but in the present day, conventional automakers tend to have trouble selling them, and startups tend to have trouble making money on them.  The latest example of the latter phenomenon appears to be Nio, a Chinese company listed on Wall Stree...

Interested companies can lease the life-like quadruped — at a pretty steep cost.  Boston Dynamics is most famously known for videos of its eerily life-life robots doing eerily life-like tasks, from opening a door to performing somersaults.  But the company says it’s finally moving from prototypes to production, and this week invited people besides its employees to take its robots for a spin.  Bost...

If there’s one thing we know about Americans, it’s that they love trucks. But even one of the top producers or pickups in the world knows that, sometimes, even pickup drivers want some wind in their hair. Which may be why the company has filed a patent exploring the idea of a pickup truck with a removeable hardtop. That’s right, a pickup truck convertible. Published last week, the patent discusses...

Elemental Processing of Lexington, Kentucky is suing Oregon-based HP Farms for $44 million over bad seeds. Elemental Processing produces CBD, a wildly popular plant extract used in various treatments. According to Oregon Live , Elemental claims that HP Farms sold it more than six million mostly worthless hemp seeds.  Elemental says that most of the seeds were male, whereas it is the feminized plan...

One reason electric vehicle adoption has been slow is the range. People are worried about the charge. They think the car will run out of juice, leaving them stranded. This story isn't going to help the cause. Last week, police officer Jesse Hartman with the City of Fremont in California was in pursuit of a suspect when his 2014 Tesla Model S 85 ran out of power.  According to The Mercury News...

Makers of Barbie and American Girl, Mattel has launched a new line of gender-inclusive dolls. Creatable World is a customizable line that allows kids to create unique dolls. The brand consists of six different kits available in various skin tones. According to the company, each kit includes the figure, two hairstyle options, six pieces of clothing, and various shoe and accessory options that chang...

Airbus wants you to have a better experience when flying in its commercial jets, so it’s going about that the best way it knows how – by tracking your every move. The aerospace company has announced that it is kicking off trials of its IoT connected cabin technologies, called “the Airspace Connected Experience.” According to Airbus , the plan is for this new initiative to both enhance its ability...

The Air Force wants a flying car, and according to a report from Defense One, they want it to replace the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor. Agility Prime is the name of a new U.S. Air Force (USAF) project to replace the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft with a combat-ready flying car.  According to Defense One, the program will begin this fall as the Air Force tries to tap into commercial flying car innovation....

Last spring , we discussed the difficulties that off-road vehicle manufacturer Polaris was having with its line of RZR all-terrain vehicles. In fact, since 2013 the company has recalled more than a half-million of the ATVs due to fires, rider injuries and one death. These issues were all tied to defective heat shields that have plagued the vehicle’s ability to operate safety for more than six year...

In 2013, a safety technician was working for French railway engineering company TSO died while traveling for work. The circumstances around his death, however, stray from your average work-related injury.  According to a report from the BBC , a man identified as Xavier X suffered a heart attack and died after having extramarital sex with a stranger in Central France. According to the New York Time...

It’s back, and while the focus of this year’s most frequently cited workplace safety violations didn’t change too dramatically from 2018, some of the factors contributing to them offer perspective on the changing face of industrial safety.  The National Safety Council and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced the preliminary Top 10 as part of the NSC Congress & Exp...

Boeing’s disaster year continues to hurtle down the runway, as we learned this week that one of the company’s planes failed a safety test – and it’s not the sidelined 737 Max jet, the model blamed for two deadly crashes since last Fall. And that might actually be worse because, this time, it’s the 777X , a Boeing plane that is still under development, but one the company needs to help offset the s...

If you look at the fastest cars in the world today, it’s hard to imagine that, 90 years ago, race cars looked like this . The 4 ½-liter supercharged “Blower Bentley” competed in the LeMans race and is considered to be one of the rarest and most valuable Bentley models in the world. Feeding off the nostalgia of this massive, two-ton race car, Bentley has announced that it will be producing 12 repli...

A 20-year-old Wisconsin man is accused of an elaborate plot to manufacture thousands of counterfeit vaping cartridges.  According to local authorities, since January 2018, Tyler Huffhines ran a "very high-tech" operation that included a staff of 10 employees.  According to a report from WISC , employees filled from 3,000 to 5,000 counterfeit cartridges a day. Each pack was professionally...

Back in April, U.S. Army Lieutenant General James Richardson told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the new ENVG-B – the army’s enhanced night vision goggle-binocular – was “better than anything (he’s) experienced” in his whole career. But according to Task & Purpose , the night vision game is hot right now and Microsoft is working on a project that could bump out this new tech as soon...

The automaker is betting that high-end buyers will be willing to pay — a lot — for an electric vehicle with Porsche performance.   German luxury automaker Porsche this week officially joined the list of automakers competing with Tesla in the nascent market for electric vehicles.   But whereas Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company and most rival automakers are working toward more economical and prac...